“There it goes,” said Merrick as an electric lamp flickered out.

“We have generators,” said Nadia to Farisa. “We’ve long been prepared for them to do this.”

It was one thirty in the afternoon of May 14; Farisa had been here for five days. The air had been warm before, with two fans running, and would turn stuffy now that power had been cut.

Nadia said, “Does the plan make sense?”

“It does,” Farisa said.

“There are no trains running today, so you’ll have to do it tomorrow night. Will you be ready?”

Farisa nodded. She wasn’t sure, given the worsening situation in Exmore, she had a choice in the matter.

“Try this on,” Nadia said as she handed Farisa a necklace with a silver chain and a small brown stone. Ouragan’s eyes followed the chain’s sway as if the cat were hypnotized.

Farisa put it around her neck. “Are you sure?”

“There’s a spell on it.”

“A spell?” Farisa had her doubts. Trinkets blessed for good luck could be bought six-for-ten on any street corner.

“It won’t last forever, but it should hold for a night or two,” Nadia said before calling for one of the bodyguards.

“We’ve met.”

“Vikus, this is—”

Farisa cut in. “He already knows who I am.”

“Anya.”

“Anya,” Vikus said. “Nice to meet you. Are you one of Merrick’s patients?”

Nadia asked, “How would you describe her skin color?”

Farisa crossed her arms. Why was this always a topic?

“She’s pale. Aside from the… um, yes. Pale.”

“Her eye color?”

“Blue,” Vikus said.

Merrick walked in and set a shot glass on the dining table. “Who’s this?”

Farisa asked, “What’s going on?”

Nadia said, “Now, take it off.”

Farisa sighed as she removed the pendant.

Vikus’s eyes widened. “Farisa? How’d you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything.” Farisa looked around. Ouragan sat on the couch, tail thumping a pillow. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“You had me thinking you were a completely different person.”

“Put the pendant on again,” Nadia said.

As she did, Vikus said, “That’s amazing.”

Farisa stood up and walked toward the bathroom. “I have to see this.”

“You’ll still see yourself,” Nadia said. “It’s everyone else who’s fooled.”

“To myself I will still be Farisa, but to everyone else...”

“You’ll be Anya. You’ll have to be. It won’t work in sunlight, because the shadows will be wrong, and it won’t fool anyone who gets closer than two or three feet, so don’t let anyone get that close to you.”

Farisa looked again at the pendant. The chain was of a metal too light and poor to be real silver, and the engraving suggested an amateur’s attempt to feign the style of a more skilled designer, but Merrick’s surprise had been genuine, and she didn’t think Vikus was lying either, and Nadia did have proven access to a very real potion, so she judged the jewel and its glamour to be genuine. What other explanation could there be?

“One more thing,” Nadia said. “You’ll be taking the cat with you.”

#

Farisa went to the balcony later that day, wearing the pendant at Nadia’s insistence, deeply curious to know what she looked like while wearing it, but with no one to ask. She had studied Merrick’s maps, but it would be useful, while studying routes, to look over the streets—she used a pair of field glasses Nadia had given her. The train station, a low gray building two miles to the east, was not difficult to spot, but the most direct route to it would not work, because Globbos had set up several blockades in the streets.

The graffiti spoke now of an orcish infestation:

There’s orcs in this town, they’re out on the hunt…

They’ll feast for ten years if they catch Mayor Munt.

She had never seen an orc before, but it did not take her long to spot four of them. The biggest, a foot and a half taller than an average man, had greenish-white skin and a head that was bald aside from wisps of silver hair in a trail that went down his back. Two of his companions appeared to be female; both were obese, with sagging, discolored breasts and scowling faces. The small one, perhaps five-and-a-half feet tall, seemed to be a child, and she could not determine its gender. All four of them were carrying metal pipes, and the large male seemed to be their leader, as he stood back with arms crossed while the two she-orcs sifted through a trash mound. Their faces were malformed, but their facial expressions—the same language of dominance and submission existed for them, too, and they seemed to understand the rudiments of cooperation—were eerily human.

The orcs ambled through one neighborhood, then the next, sorting through trash for sustenance, licking animal bones and eating discarded vegetation. Their behavior had discernable patterns. They preferred wide streets better than narrow ones, for example, which they tended to hurry through if they could not go around them. The male seemed to have slow reflexes in spite of superhuman strength. It could also not be said that they lacked focus, excluding the child, who would sometimes find an inedible object in a trash mound to use as a toy. They understood something would be there for them to the north; they could hear, but not yet see, it. They entered the labyrinthine cadaver of a factory, maneuvered deftly through it, and reached a spacious trimmed lawn. An eighty-pound mountain dog, seeing them coming, tried to run away, pulled taut the chain restricting it to the property, and darted the other way in a panic. As the orcs closed around it, its hackles went up and it bared its teeth.

The four oversized muscular—they were not beasts, they were not human—teased the scared animal. They would create an opening so the dog would try to escape, but one of the she-orcs would yank the chain back, causing it to lose footing. Once they had tired of this,. the child picked the animal up and, with swiftness and force beyond most human adults, tossed it to the large male, who grabbed the yelping dog’s scruff and, with full-body motion, broke its body against the brick wall of a house. The dog’s limbs splayed; it fell to the ground, limbs twitching, blood gushing. The orcs tore the dying dog apart, shoving fistfuls of muscle and innards into their red, wet mouths.

That taught Farisa everything she needed to know about orcs.

#

She went downstairs to the living room. Vikus was standing guard at the bright window. No children were playing outside, nor were the sounds of animals.

Nadia asked, “Did you learn anything useful about the city?”

Farisa groaned.

“You saw something, didn’t you?”

“Aye.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Please.”

Nadia handed her a white ceramic cup with a hot beverage inside that smelled like honey, but had enough alcohol to bite.

Farisa took her first sip as she sat down. “How are there orcs in Exmore?”

Vikus, not turning his head, said. “They must have escaped the Globbo pyramid downtown.”

Merrick entered the room and sat on the piano bench. “I don’t think they escaped.”

“No?”

“The Company is up to something. They were probably released on purpose.”

Farisa scratched her neck. “What would the Company have so many orcs?”

“Orc’s blood,” Nadia said.

“You know about that?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“Had the same purpose when we were young,” Merrick said.

Farisa shuddered. “I’m glad I avoided the varteros.”

Vikus asked, “Do they still call it ‘oggro’?”

“In Cait Forest, they did.”

Nadia said, “I never thought I’d see orcs on these streets.”

Farisa replayed the escape plan in her mind. “Does it change anything?”

Merrick paused. “For us, it might be a good thing. Orcs’ll scare the town indoors. Vikus will be with you most of the way, and he’ll be armed.”

Vikus said, “Orcs are scared of loud noises, or so I’m told.”

“I’d rather the city have ten orcs in it than a thousand people, since any one of those thousand might be Company.”

Farisa swallowed. She could say with seven kinds of sincerity that she hoped to meet neither.

“Let’s go over the details one more time,” Nadia said.

“I’ll be... Anya? Anya, you said.”

“That’s correct.”

“The train leaves at a quarter after ten. We’ll hop into a coal car, because those are never checked. Shortly after midnight, the train will crest Stony Mountain, which is the slowest point on the route.”

“Ten miles an hour,” Merrick said. “Safest place to—”

“Jump,” Farisa said. “Vikus will go first. We’ll find a pavilion at the head of a trail that we follow—”

“Keeping your lights as low as you can,” Nadia said.

“—for three miles to Waystation Imka, where we’ll meet Claes.”

“I’ve told him one o’clock,” said Merrick.

“But we’ll probably be there around one thirty,” said Farisa. “Assuming everything goes right.”

Vikus said, “A lot can go wrong.”

Nadia agreed. “That’s why I’m glad you’re going together.”

#

Shortly before midnight, Farisa carried a candle into the bathroom. She would be leaving this place in twenty-one hours. This time tomorrow, she’d be sore and dirty and cold on a freight train, but she told herself she could be warm and clean tonight, so she drew a bath, balancing the temperature by feel. She mixed the soaps and perfumes herself. She had seen none of the servants; in times like this, they had more important matters to mind.

“The most beautiful house I’ve ever seen, and I’m leaving it tomorrow,” she said to no one in particular. “So it is. So it always is, Raqel.”

Raqel; that name, Raqel. Her thoughts drifted as another memory settled into place. How had she forgotten the woman’s distinct appearance? She could again remember her raven-haired best friend’s gray eyes. Something had happened between the two of them, but what? Had they... kissed?

No, Farisa. That is a game you cannot play. You risk mixing fantasy into memory; then, you become unmoored from the truth.

She felt nothing unsure of her ability to be sure what had happened. The circumstances of her life in Cait Forest were returning to mind slowly, but still a blur. Memory’s return, she decided, could not be forced. To do so was like to demand restful sleep—the mind rebels against its own command.

“I miss you, Raqel.”

Thunder rumbled in the Exmore distance. Farisa pulled the stopper from the tub’s bottom. The madhouse grit had gone down the drain several baths ago, but even still, she did not feel fully clean of it, and she wondered if she ever would.

#

Nadia opened a window, careful to leave a shade down because several oil lamps were on. It was close enough to summer that sleep would be impossible without a nighttime cross-flow of air. She looked through a shelf of books, deciding which ones she would take on the Northwest Trail. All but those that could fit in two crates, she would have to give away.

She was starting to worry about Merrick, whom she believed underestimated the hazards of the Trail. He spoke with certainty about the dori they would establish once there. Although prior trail-goers had found peace with the taigamen—a good thing, no doubt—it seemed inevitable that issues would occur once the nomadic natives realized that the Vehu intended to live in the Yatek forever. Those hundred tribes barely got along with each other. Crossfire from conflict among them was one possibility, but it would be worse if an upstart young chieftain decided to use distrust of, or antipathy toward, the region’s new residents as a unifying force. These issues all existed in addition to an Alma Winter, sure to snarl the whole continent.

The Vehu would be reliant on strangers to survive, and that was a position from which nothing tended to go well for them. They did not even always like each other. The self-styled vaczosou (“purest in faith”) could stand neither modernou, like Nadia and Merrick in the life they’d had here, nor the devout but leftist doriyats. Vaczosou, who still practiced arranged marriage, considered the Global Company to be divine punishment for a lack of piety; their sabotage of a migration of their own people could not be ruled out.

Merrick had begun to drink again, and she had decided to allow this, ready to intervene if it worsened, because of new and considerable work stresses. Once in a great while, every doctor had to explain to a decrepit or morbidly ill patient why a request for “the long sleep” could be granted. Far worse was to be confronted by the aftermath of one who had tried to go alone on the matter and failed. Of late, these inquiries were coming from the young. Most of them had no option but to work for the Employer; being dead had risen the ranks to become, by comparison, a noble profession.

Nadia closed a crate, half full of books but already too heavy for her to lift it. She had lived in this house her whole life, and some of the possessions she would be leaving behind had belonged to her great-grandfather. The hardcover first edition of Freedom at Midnight—a vivid historical account of the Vehu pirates who had smashed the Polar Ocean slave trade, fighting battles that raged for weeks under the never-setting sun—could not be carried unless two other books were abandoned. The paperback edition would have to do.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Farisa walked into the living room. The darling girl wore beige pajamas and white cotton socks. She picked up a book from the discard pile. “Spacza wy Vehu?”

“Oh, don’t read that garbage,” Nadia said.

“I hope it’s a bootleg copy.”

“It is.” Nadia laughed. “I wouldn’t buy it, but you’ve got to know your enemy.”

Spacza wy Vehu—money and Vehu, a coinish play on sophya wy fariza, was an incoherent 608-page ramble that both accused Vehu of a clandestine desire to turn the whole world into a dori—as if a tiny religious group had such power—and blamed them for the rise of Alcazar, now the Global Company, in addition to a dozen plagues and famines that had occurred over the past two centuries. A five-year-old could have spotted the flaws in its arguments, and most of the testimonies therein had been forged, but Spacza had sold nine million copies, and its publisher was further rewarded when acquired, at a price of twelve million grot, by the Alcazar-led Global Company in ’57.

“It’s unfair,” Farisa said as she reached into a bowl and grabbed a handful of red grapes. “You can’t win, can you?”

“No.” Nadia saw on Farisa’s face the sad kindness of a child who’d just learned she couldn’t pray a dead rabbit back to life. “It seems we can’t.”

“When you’re poor and do what it takes to survive, the wealthy have the durn to say you are greedy, simply for trying to stay in one piece. Then, when you do have a little success, those who are truly powerful make you a human shield, a scapegoat for their own crimes, leading the poor to attribute your success to malice and conspiracy.”

“That is exactly true, Farisa.”

“They politicize your status—”

“Even our right to exist.”

“—to create another wedge with which working people are divided, even though ninety-nine percent of you—”

“—are working people.”

Ouragan came out of the shadows, and Farisa scratched the tabby cat’s head.

“I bet the Globbos would find a way to blame you for a flood and a drought at the same time.”

Nadia laughed. “We control the weather through witchcraft.”

Farisa picked Ouragan up and held the animal to her chest. “Well, there’s nothing so wrong with that.”

“You should sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a difficult day.” Nadia had only known this woman for five days, but she would miss her. God, she would miss her. “For all of us.”

“Good night, Nadia.”

“Good night, Farisa,” the old woman said.

She went back into the kitchen and sorted through another crate. Merrick loved pickles, so they’d be taking twelve jars of those. Spices could go on the bottom for now. Once they reached the dori, there’d be time and space for proper cooking, and they might even be able to return to their vegetarian diet, but while they were on the Trail, they’d be thankful to get a steady supply of fish and caribou.

Nadia looked over her task list. She had completed all but one; there was something she had meant to tell Farisa about her father. But would she remember it in the moment, with all the emotions that a farewell entailed?

Yovah-gehemnit, another goodbye.

#

The next day, Merrick heard a knock on his front door around three in the afternoon. Because his office had been ransacked overnight, he was meeting a patient in his living room.

“This Dr. Harrison. Is he one of us?”

“Vehu?” Merrick said. “He is not, but he lives in the District—or what was the District—and he has served this place well. I have known him for two decades. He’s as good a doctor as I am, and he’s twenty years younger, so you’re in good hands.”

The knock came louder.

“Sorry, but I suspect I have to take this.” Merrick got up and went to his front door, which he opened. “Can you come back in an hour? I'm seeing a—”

“Detective Karl Gaines.” The heavyset man with sandy hair, wearing an ill-fitting brown uniform, pushed the door so it could not be closed. “I cannot.”

“I’m finishing up,” Merrick said.

The brown-clad officer entered the living room told Merrick’s patient, “You’ll have to leave us.”

“I suppose I can’t refuse your company,” the doctor said to the detective. Local police were technically not Globbos, but the power, methods, and intentions were usually similar. The color of the uniform was the only thing that changed. “I’ll make you some coffee.” He turned to face the upstairs and shouted, “Nadia, where’s the coffee?”

“Your coffee’s safe,” said Nadia, who understood the signal in the word “coffee.” “Ready, I mean.”

“No need for that swill.” The detective sat in Merrick’s chair. “It’s bad for the stomach. D’ya have any idea why I’m here?”

“I read the graffiti sometimes. There’ve been threats against our people.”

“Nah, it isn’t that. There’s been chaff as long as I’ve been in this job. Never amounts to anything.”

“In that case, no, I don’t know why you’re here.”

The detective scratched his clean-shaven face. “Orcs.”

“Orcs?”

“There’s ten, maybe fifteen of them in the city. We’ve shot all the ones we know about. No one seems to know why they’re here, or who let them loose.”

“I see. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anything either, Detective.”

“We found an orc child’s body right outside the station. Head weighs about five pounds, true as true gets. One of my underlings took the head—a scrap of neck was hanging on—and brought it into the office. It has become a distraction for my desk guys. They were jabbing the eyes to see if anything would come out. If you put the head on one of those long, bendy pencils, you can fling it, oh, I’d say about fifteen feet. Damn thing reeks.”

“I bet it does,” Merrick said.

The detective spread his legs and put his wrists above his knees. “That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about. I know you lot are in the perfume business.”

“We have no investment of the sort.” Merrick whispered, “To tell you the truth, what’s in this house is all we have these days. We’re probably poorer than you.”

“I don’t mean your family. I mean, you know…”

Merrick raised an eyebrow.

“I mean your people. One of you vyr—I mean, Vehu—released the orcs.”

Merrick had heard too much of this nonsense for one lifetime. “Why would anyone do that?”

“Have you been downtown? The whole place stinks. The orcs kill animals, they kill people, and they never dispose of the corpses either, so they make the whole city smell bad. They shit on the streets, and they smell like rotting cum themselves. This has got to be fantastic for the perfume business.”

“It may be, but I assure you that we know nothing about this, and neither does my wife.”

“So you say,” said Gaines. “No charges, but I need you to tell your people I can’t have this orc nonsense in my city, you understand?”

“I do. If I learn anything, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”

The detective laughed as he stood up. “The sorts of things Vehu will do to sell a product. What’s next, trolls and ghouls?” He shook his head. “This job ages you.”

“So does mine.” Merrick forced a smile. “I don’t look it, but I’m thirty-six.”

“Very well.” Detective Gaines walked toward the door and opened it, but then turned around at the last minute, walking closer than Merrick would have liked to their staircase. “I forgot to mention one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“As I said, we don’t usually read the chaff, but we’re being careful right now. We’ve got fifty men watching the neighborhood. To protect you, of course.”

“For decades, we’ve protected ourselves just fine.”

“We’re watching all the houses with numbers the Vehu like, the ones with sevens and threes in the address.”

“You mean the prime numbers?”

“It’s folk like you who decide which houses are prime.” The detective shook his head in condescension, as if he had explained a basic fact to an idiot, then walked back to Merrick’s front door. “To me, a house is a house. In any case, there’ll be four sets of eyes on your home at all times.”

“Thank you, sir, but that won’t be necessary.”

“I don’t offer, Merrick.” The brown-clad man touched the doctor’s back. “The decision has been made.”

“Fair enough, I guess. We might be hiding Vehu in our attic.”

“Not bad. You should be a comic.”

“I’m a doctor.”

Gaines walked outside. “Same thing, isn’t it?”

Merrick stood in the doorway. “Goodbye, Detective.”

“Well, ‘fuck off’ to you too. Hope not to see your kind till I’m your age.”

“I hope for that as well.”

#

Nadia watched as the sun went down. Their servants had been paid up and dismissed with three months of additional wages and perfect letters. With each departure, this large house crept closer to quietude.

She stepped into Farisa’s room. “On the matter of your disguise—”

Farisa looked up from a novel she had nearly finished. “The pendant?”

“Right, of course. The pendant will glamour you to look like a burn victim, a street child. There are enough of those these days that it won’t draw notice, even from Globbos. No one will see you because no one will want to see you.”

“That makes sense.”

“As a result, you can’t take anything along. Put all the things you want to pack on this bed, and once things cool down in town, we’ll send your possessions to a safe drop where Claes can pick them up.”

Farisa nodded. “I will do that.”

“The glamour only affects your bodily appearance, not your clothing, so you’ll need to dress the part.”

“I understand. I’m not picky about what I wear.”

“You’ll be barefoot.”

Farisa drew a tense breath and shook her head.

“The poor don’t have shoes. No one’s going to look at your feet, darling.”

Farisa groaned. “I really don’t like this idea.”

“You don’t. Farisa doesn’t. You’ll be Anya. You’ll have pale skin. You’ll be... someone else entirely.”

“I’m getting shoes as soon as we find a town.”

“Do so, once you’re out and”—Nadia sniffled—“safe.”

“Don’t cry, Nadia.”

That’s the worst thing you can say, you sweet fool.

#

Farisa heard the grandfather clock upstairs ring nine times. Darkness had fallen outside.

“Ready?” Merrick said.

Farisa kissed her shoulder, then the other.

Merrick rolled his eyes.

“It’s a Lorani gesture.” The word rhakis, in Loranian, meant “shoulder” as well as “lieutenant.” This gesture, once that of an ancient female general to express trust in her command, had become a more general expression of female poise.

“I know what it means,” Merrick said. “Overconfidence is dangerous right now. So much can go wrong. Tell me again: where are you meeting Vikus?”

“Three Raven Pub, shuttered twelve years ago, Twenty-Sixth and Eisen.”

“And the train runs at…?”

“Ten fifteen.” She looked at the pocket watch the man had given her. “Seventy-four minutes from now.”

Merrick opened his arms for a hug. “Goodbye, Farisa. And good luck.”

“Thank you so much. I can’t possibly say how much I—”

“There’d be no time for it if you could. Go.”

Nadia added, “Ouragan will follow you. Make sure you don’t get separated. Remember: you are Anya now.”

Merrick opened a hidden door, exposing a ladder.

Farisa—Anya: remember, you’re Anya—descended into a back alley. She had memorized the streets between here and Three Raven, so she did not need to look for street signs, though she doubted she would find any. She already hated that she was barefoot, because there were all manner of things on the ground that she would not want to step in even if she were wearing shoes. She skipped over everything visibly odious. Ouragan, the cat, ran ahead of her. The night sky, from the smoke of Exmore’s trash fires and Alma’s first haze, had taken on the color of rust.

Anya had never been to 139 Andor Street. Anya didn’t know why she was in the Vehu District. Anya found the large houses, even when stripped of all signs of prior wealth, intimidating. Anya was fourteen years old, a pale-skinned burn victim, and very unfortunately barefoot, just as barefoot as she had been the time she ran through the forest fi—no, that memory belonged to someone else, someone other than Anya.

The District’s western checkpoint had fallen, the barricade half-dismantled and easy to go around. Butcher’s Row, a quarter mile farther on, had a century-thick odor of panicked animals. Street pebbles cut into Anya’s feet. When she thought others could see her, she crept; when sure she was out of the world’s view, she ran as fast as she could. She slowed to a walk at Thirty-Third Street, where a couple men stood at a corner under a solitary gas lamp. There was no avoiding sight by them, but she seemed to draw no notice.

The concrete rubble of a collapsed bridge established that she had reached Eisen Street. She counted blocks until she found a squat free-standing building with a wooden sign on the balustrade that said, in faded blue print, Three Raven Pub. She put a rusty key in the lock and the cylinder whined, but then the door opened immediately from inside. She heard Vikus’s voice.

“Good,” he said from a corner. The dark colors of his clothing made him nearly invisible. “You’re here. Ready?”

“I think so.”

“Do you know how to use a gun?”

She shook her head.

“I have two. I’ll carry both, then. Town’s about to flip over. You don’t want to be caught beneath it when it does.”

“I hate guns.” Farisa remembered the day she and Erysi had found that Globbo gun in Cait Forest. That had come to nothing—nothing she could remember—but it had been symbolic of the horror to follow, and—No, you’re not Farisa right now. Anya pushed that Farisa thought down.

“So do I.”

Without a word, while keeping half a block of distance between the two of them to avoid attention, they walked north to Thirty-Ninth Street and turned right on Eagle Street. Eagle Street to Forty-Fourth. Forty-Fourth to Ibis. A misty rain began to fall.

Vikus stopped under an awning and waited for Farisa to catch up. “We need to go faster.”

The rain turned cold, coming in heavier droplets that ran down her exposed skin. They walked beside the church of some religion outlawed long ago. The door had rotted out, and Farisa (Anya) worried that someone might jump out from inside, but no one did. Vikus jogged, setting a pace that Anya had to run to match. As they followed Ibis northeast, the streets grew farther apart: Fiftieth Street, Fifty-First… Fifty-Second… jogging… Fifty-Third. Ouragan ran ahead of both of them, poked her gray head around a corner, and gave a reassuring glance.

In the distance, a clock rang out ten.

“Fuck,” Vikus said. “We’re still about a mile away. Can you run?”

“I am!” Her toes kept slipping on the cobblestones, and balance was hard to keep. She crossed a rain puddle whose depth she had misjudged, and nearly twisted her ankle. The turns grew tighter and the alleys darker, and for a moment she thought she had fallen so far behind Vikus as to have lost him, but Ouragan—quite wet, meowing in displeasure, sometimes visible only by the gleam of her eyes—indicated the way.

She could see Vikus’s figure again as she came to a wide boulevard. They were close enough to the railyard to hear clanging sounds from nighttime work on the tracks.

In the misty distance, two lights came on. A man’s voice shouted, “Halt!”

Her teeth chattered. She looked at Vikus. “Are we stopping?”

“They might shoot us if we don’t, so yes.”

The men’s paraffin lamps swayed as they approached.

“It’s city cops,” Vikus whispered.

“Not Globbos?”

“Same shit, different stink. Better than rail police, though. Rail is where the Company puts the sorts of people who cut up snakes as kids.”

The heavier man came first, “Let me see the girl.”

Farisa held the pendant between two fingers. She hoped the glamour was real, because her face had been printed in the local papers, so her safety depended on it.

The portly man’s gun gleamed in the rusty light. “I can’t have you out here peddling… is that a…? What the…? Ray! Ray, get over here!”

A tall, thin officer walked forward.

“This guy has one of the orcs.”

Farisa, though glad to know the glamour had worked, felt insulted.

“Before I take ’er from you, I gotta ask. What do you get for that? Ten grot a night, for the novelty? Fifteen? Twenty. Me bets it’s twenty.”

“That’s no orc,” said the patrolman named Ray.

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s not. She’s just ugly. Those are burn scars. House fire, probably. I’ve seen orcs, and they look nothing like her.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Someone brought an orc’s head to the office today. We played a few games of kvotya, second floor versus the third, until the hoop broke.”

“Who won?”

“They did, but sure as sunshine on shit, that’s no orc.”

“Whew.” The portly man’s shoulders dropped in relief. “Wouldna known what to do if you’d had a real one. You know, rawwwrrrururrrrgh.”

“I’m still quite curious.” The tall officer patted Vikus’s arm with his backhand. “Are you dealing her out? Is there a market for that?”

Vikus said, “She’s my girlfriend.”

“Well, you’re a hero for taking that one off the world. Do you mind if I ask where you’re going?”

“The hospital.”

“You’re going the wrong way, then. It’s to the south. Thurston and Lark.”

“Thurston and Lark,” Vikus said. “Thank you, Officers. She’s pretty ill, so we better go.”

The detour would cost them time, so they hurried, snaking back around in the correct direction once they had escaped the men’s sight. Vikus spotted an alley that joined another one that joined another one... leading them to the railyard’s chain-link fence with wooden posts. Ouragan quickly climbed. Vikus followed. Farisa had climbed trees and walls before, but this fence seemed to fight her on the way up and, once she had come over it, threw her to the ground.

“Farisa.”

“Don’t say my name!”

“Your glamour’s off. You’re pretty again.”

“You’re very handsome.” Farisa looked at her legs, bruised from the fall. “Nothing meant by it, but credit is owed.”

“All’s well.” Vikus extended a hand, helping Farisa up. “I have a girlfriend who’ll be joining us.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“I’ll explain more on the train. She’ll be an asset to us. She’s a crack shot.”

The train’s whistle announced its impending departure. The two of them sprinted, dodging piles of rusty scrap metal and discarded machine parts, avoiding movement through light as much as possible. The train’s rear car came into view—the open-topped coal bucket was only a quarter full. They would get filthy, but there was space and they would fit easily.

Farisa expected Vikus to jump in, but he stopped short as a woman came running.

“My girlfriend, Mazie.”

Mazie raised a pistol. “Put yer ’ands where I can see them!”

Farisa recognized, by the twang in her voice, a pessima. The gunwoman wore all black—leather boots, dark denim pants, a vest with cotton sleeves—and, in spite of the heat, a woolen winter hat. Her skin would have been pale during the day but glowed orange in the foul industrial light.

“I’m not fucking around ’ere!” Farisa locked eyes with the barrel of Mazie’s gun. “Let me see yer ’ands.”

Farisa showed her palms. She looked at Vikus. She would have asked what the hell was going on, had she been able to form words, but as the man’s gun hand fell and Vikus's face turned blank, it became obvious: this stupid, stupid man had chosen a pessima for his girlfriend, and now they were fucked.

“I’m sorry, Farisa.” Vikus shook his head. “You’re not getting on the train tonight.”